Yesterday at the gym while I harnessed my ankle to a pulley system in order to torture my hamstrings and glutes, my attention wandered, as it often does, to the other people working out near me. I saw a couple who appeared to be working out together, and I watched them take turns using a machine designed for upright rows. At one point, while the woman sat tall and engaged her rhomboids while pulling the handles back, the man tenderly caressed the top of her head.Â Instantly my thoughts propelled me back to all the myriad times when my beloved tenderly caressed my poor brain tumorâ€™d head. I nearly broke…

You know the thing where something just tumbles out of your mouth because you think you are safe, but the reaction from the person you said it to tells you that not only are you not safe but that the thing you said was probably the worst possible thing you could ever say? That. That is what happened to me literally just now, and it happens often, too often, so often that now I have to examine why. Why does this happen. Tell me. Not going to tell me? Fine, I will tell you. Number One. I Don’t Think Before I Talk. Oh yes. This is so me. I think…

I haven’t told you yet about my hands. When I was in middle school and high school, people frequently told me I had “piano hands”. Long slim fingers, oval-shaped nails â€” I guess those things make piano hands. The same people also assumed I played piano, which I did a little if you count “FÃ¼r Elise”, “Moonlight Sonata”, and “Just the Way You Are” by Billy Joel. My hands have been so useful. Writing, chopping onions, riding horses, soothing fevered brows, folding towels, driving cars. For all of these things, my hands were there, helping. In my 30’s I became a knitter. Knitting was the thing to do among moms…

My beloved and I had an argument-thing today. It was brief. The gist was this: I interrupt him. Often. Multiple times a day. And I am unaware of doing it. This is, of course, Not Good. It is a sign that my brain is not functioning as per normal. We parsed the offending conversation, down to (what seemed like) the nanosecond. This is what happened during The Interruption: He talked. He paused. Then my talking-machinery ground into action, causing me to talk. Meanwhile, he was still talking, but I had no idea he was still talking. Oops. Interruptus Maximus. Evidently this kind of thing happens All The Time. I am…

Guess what it’s like, knowing that you used to be pretty capable and smart but now you struggle remembering a thing from just 5 minutes ago, and your vocabulary is down at least three notches, and many days it’s hard to even make words? Go on, guess. No wait, I’ll tell you. It’s scary. And it totally sucks. I don’t know whether my abilities will ever return. Maybe they will. I hope they will. I know now that my two brain surgeries from over three years ago aren’t responsible for these deficits. For a long time I thought,Â well my brain is just healing and needs time. Fuck healing. I have…

My dad belonged to a group for smart people called Mensa. As a child I imagined the meetings as a bunch of guys standing around talking logarithmic equations in their white short-sleeved button-down shirts with skinny ties, with pens protruding from their pocket protectors. Maybe a slide rule poking out of a back pocket. My dad had to take a test to get into Mensa. Mensa means “table” in Latin. There are now about 134,000 members around the world. My dad was very proud of the fact that he had been tested at a 165 IQ or maybe 190, and he was obviously a card-carrying Mensa member. I mean, really.…

They say that crows are harbingers of death. Bad omens. I say nay. As I left the gym two days ago, sweaty-yet-glowing from my workout, I saw a large black shape near the top of the palm tree just outside the double glass exit doors. A raven? Nope. Crow. Crows are like the Death card in Tarot. Death = change. Okay. Change right now is good. We need change. I drove home, thinking about the hundreds of messages I was about to launch into the world, messages telling of our five exhausting years of cancer terror and asking for help because we fell so deep into a hole that we…

My brain has a new curfew. Itâ€™s not allowed to make words past 7 pm. This is to avoid unnecessary misunderstandings between me and my beloved, who keeps telling me I donâ€™t make sense when in fact I know I am making perfect sense. We cannot both be right. My brain must abdicate and I must learn to live with it. But this is a hard, hard thing for some one who grew up thinking that to be Right was to be Good, and to be Good meant being worthy of being alive. Ergo, to give up being Right feels a little like death. Or the imminent prospect of death,…

I was so excited to go to the library today. It had been years since I set foot in a library. The last time was, well, I cannot remember when the last time was, I just remember that it had a row of computers that always seemed in use. And the end of the rows were marked with papers that said which kind of books could be found there. I read a lot then. I even read several biographies, which was weird but oddly satisfying. I can remember many details about the library but not where or when it was. None of this should surprise me, given how things went…

There is a documentary out called My Beautiful Broken Brain, about a woman learning to communicate again after her brain injury. I keep meaning to watch it. But I just realized I don’t need to watch it â€” I am living it. It turns out that I am not as invincible as I once thought. Repairable, yes. Invincible, no. I have permanent brain injury. Brain damage. My brain got jostled about during its two surgeries, and it was even shifted over to one side for a few months, which I am now told is a Bad Thing. Some people don’t recover well from it. I’ve beat worse odds than this…